Most of the industrialized nations of the World are faced with very serious problems in attempting to develop environmentally sound and economically affordable methods for disposing of their municipal solid waste, other solid wastes and hazardous waste materials. The problems appear most extensive, serious and costly in the major metropolitan areas of the United States. The so-called "sanitary landfills" have never provided environmentally practical or desirable means for disposing of solid waste materials, but have the convenient advantage of Substantially concealing the problems. Their shortcomings and the serious environmental degradation they cause are becoming vividly apparent as the problems mount. Most of the existing landfills contain unknown quantities of materials now classified as "hazardous waste".
However, landfills remain the primary means used for placing the problems "out of sight-out of mind". Improved landfill criteria and techniques, soon to be required, can perhaps provide less undesirable means of permanent storage in landfills, than has been practiced in the past, but generally at substantially greater costs. The new improved landfills, however, do not seem to provide either environmentally desirable or economically attractive solutions for the problems of solid waste disposal.
The current methods of solid waste disposal typically result in the wasting of very valuable energy and materials resources. Given adequate processing technologies, these resources can be advantageously and profitably recovered and utilized for producing clean-burning alternative fuels, various types of useful building materials, large tonnages of valuable metals, and various useful byproducts. Their recovery and utilization can also effect conservation of energy and fuels, mineral resources, and valuable land otherwise required for landfills.
The fuel alcohols and the blended-alcohol fuels produced can be most beneficial for supplementing the limited gasoline and diesel fuel supplies available from the rapidly diminishing liquid petroleum resources of this Nation. Producing and using such fuels by the processes and means provided can substantially reduce the Nation's critical dependence on unreliable, politically dangerous, and expensive imported crude oil, by replacing automotive fuels equal to about one-third of the Nation's peacetime gasoline consumption. High employment, industrial revitalization, economic stability and stronger national defense could result from broad-based development of these technologies.
The high-quality building materials which can be produced are very valuable, and their production can reduce the amount of quarrying and dredging required, as well as conserving considerable amounts of production and transportation energy otherwise required. The metals which can be recovered for reuse, again and again, are obviously very valuable, and this means of repetitive reuse, or continuing recycling, can also reduce the amount of mining required and the large amounts of energy required for mining our remaining low-grade ores and for producing metals from the ores. The other byproducts will also be useful and can conserve energy in various ways, one of significance being the heat energy otherwise required for extraction of elemental sulfur from the earth. Coproducts can be produced at lower costs than by other means, thus stimulating industrial activity and U.S. competitiveness in the World's marketplaces.
Substantial savings can be realized by eliminating the costly means currently used for permanently burying solid waste materials in landfills, or for incinerating them and then burying the remaining, often more toxic, solid waste from the incinerators. Savings can also be realized by effecting more profitable and beneficial use of the waste resources, compared to producing refuse-derived fuels, which have limited profit potentials and complicate other environmental problems. The crude oil resources of the United States have been depleted to the extent that the Nation is now critically dependent, for more than one-half its needs, on foreign sources of crude oil and petroleum products, to maintain its basic economy and its national defense. This presents serious problems for both our Nation and for the entire World. Reducing the quantities of crude oil needed, while also reducing fuel costs, could obviously be most beneficial to the Nation and the World.
Attempts have been made to use various types of incineration as means for reducing the amount, or volume, of materials which must be buried in landfills. However, few of these types of projects have survived, and few if any have provided economically affordable improvements or effective solutions to the solid waste problems. Various attempts have also been made to utilize solid wastes directly, blended with other fuels, or after some form of processing, as fuels for producing steam for electric power generation or for use in processing, space heating and air conditioning applications. While some projects have proven technically feasible, few if any have proven to be either environmentally desirable or economically attractive. Most waste energy recovery projects which are in operation cost the municipalities more than the original landfills they replaced, and it is perhaps questionable if they represent substantial environmental improvements.
Large amounts of funding for research and development have been appropriated and spent by Government and Industry, in attempts to find practical answers to the problems of dealing with solid waste materials, with only limited amounts of realistic improvement or useful knowledge having evolved therefrom. The problems, as evidenced by very frequent news accounts, remain largely unsolved, and there seem to be no environmentally acceptable, economically feasible, and realistically affordable solutions provided by the present state-of-the-art technologies.
There have also been very large expenditures of research and development funds in attempts to commercially develop the alcohol fuels, both methanol and ethanol, as alternative fuels, primarily for replacing petroleum-based gasolines. This could ease the rapidly escalating problems of providing crude oil-based transportation fuels for the Nation, from expensive and politically unreliable foreign crude oil. Obviously, the alcohol fuels can be produced from non-petroleum feedstocks. However, the state-of-the-art technologies and available business strategies have not produced significant quantities of commercially available alcohol fuels, even with substantial federal and state incentives of various types. Attempts to mandate the use of alcohol fuels, have resulted instead in "oxygenated fuels" being mandated, which allows continued reliance and dependence on petroleum-based products. This encourages the petroleum-oriented refining industry to continue the use of petroleum-based additives, instead of using alcohols, and the well intended efforts have been counter-productive. The use of alcohol fuels to supplement gasolines has contributed very little if anything toward reducing the Nation's critical dependence on foreign crude oil, which is favored by the petroleum-based multi-national and domestic fuels industries, because they both benefit greatly from continued national dependence on foreign crude oil and the resulting price escalations, as the Nation, its economy, and its people suffer the consequences.
The use of neat methanol (methanol alone) as an automotive fuel, requires special engines for optimum performance, or modifications of the engine's carburetion or fuel injection systems, if conventional engines are used. Some problems still remain in using methanol, as such, as a fuel for Otto cycle engines. Also, it has not been possible to develop sufficient large markets for fuel methanol to encourage its production on a large enough scale to achieve reasonably low production costs and market prices. While a thorough, in-depth government-funded study has substantially proven that fuel methanol could be produced from remote off-shore natural gas, available in tremendous quantities in many areas throughout the World; and could be profitably sold for about twenty cents per gallon at the ship-mounted plants, there have been no projects developed or planned to produce such low-cost fuel methanol. Future fuel methanol prices are still being predicted at forty to eighty cents per gallon by Oil Industry, Chemical Industry, Research Institute and Department of Energy sources, for some unclear reason.
Fuel ethanol as a neat fuel (ethanol only), performs very well in the Otto cycle engines, but it is too expensive to be competitive with gasolines, as ethanol is now produced. Break-even costs without subsidies, in 1989, were generally about one dollar and twenty cents per gallon, for producing fuel ethanol by fermentation of corn, which makes it a very expensive automotive fuel. The costs are also critically dependent on the price of corn, and this has been devastating for most would-be producers, causing many to become bankrupt. The net energy benefits resulting from the use of ethanol as a fuel are controversial, and it may be questionable whether the Federal and State subsidies proposed and effected are economically and practically justifiable.
Considerable energy in various forms is required for providing the feedstock grains and for producing fermentation fuel ethanol. Some argue that it is not feasible from the energy balance standpoint. The energy benefits-versus-energy costs analyses are very complex and have historically been controversial. The energy arguments have no relevance for the processes and means provided herein, because the steam is provided very efficiently from cogeneration steam-electric power plants, to provide the heat energy for the fuel ethanol plants. Most of the arguments about wasting food values are essentially fiction or deliberate misrepresentation, since practically none of the real food value of corn is utilized in the fermentation process. In fact, there is considerable reason to believe that the actual effective food values of the co-products of ethanol production may exceed those of the corn feedstock as animal feeds, and there are potentials for improved food supplements as well.
The present invention provides effective practical solutions for most of the very difficult solid waste disposal problems. The solutions provided are of such a nature that effecting the solutions will be very profitable, instead of costly, and can beneficially affect many aspects of the Nation's economy as well, which is rather unique to say the least. The fuels can be sold at bargain prices to the motoring public or to vehicle fleet owners, without federal or state subsidies, and the same federal excise tax and state and city taxes, per unit of fuel value, can be paid on these new fuels as are paid for gasolines. The sale prices for the methanol-ethanol-gasoline and additive fuels, which are called Trinary Fuels, should be in the range of sixty cents per gallon, at the production facilities, based on mid-1990 values of the dollar.
One gallon of Trinary Fuels should be the equivalent, in miles driven, to about two-thirds of a gallon of premium-quality unleaded gasoline; perhaps equivalent to more than this amount of gasoline, when used in the latest model auto engines, or in the dual-fuel engines, which are more ideally suited to the Trinary Fuels. There are sufficient solid waste materials collected in the United States, according to data provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, to produce enough Trinary Fuels to replace about one third of the peacetime total gasoline consumption of the Nation. This could more than offset U. S. dependence on Persian Gulf crude oil, allowing the purchase of imported crude at reasonable prices from other areas of the World, and from more dependable sources, to suffice for supplementing our domestic crude oil supplies for gasoline, diesel fuel and aviation fuel production.